It is clear that DDR1 memory standard is not going anytime soon. After all, the market shares for this already mature technology and platform is already in place and many users will not gain benefits by adopting the next generation (915 and 925 chipsets) Intel platform over the current generation (i875P) one. While there are speculations that AMD will soon adopt the PCIe and other newer technology based platforms, the due date is still not clear. Of course, we can't ignore the price to performance ratio, which is causing the largest slowdown of the adoption of newer technologies. The industry is walking down a very uncertain yet predictable path at this point. While many industry leaders are in confusion, the memory market is fairly well covered and was predicted to go in the right direction at the beginning of this year. Samsung and Intel was confident of the DDR1 performance and stated that it will take time for everyone to adopt to DDR2 technology. In a conference call that we attended with IBM, Intel, and Samsung, the progression graph of DDR2 was slowly rising and will hopefully peak by mid-2005.

While much of the future is already in place for DDR1, it is not as simple to recommend the current generation of memory modules. The decision, of course, is made difficult by Samsung and their low-latency modules. When they can overclock as high as some of the top performing memory modules, why would someone want to purchase a higher speed memory? After all, the Samsung ICs can easily handle the stress at such high bus speeds and perform even better. We tackle performance results, price to performance ratios, the need for faster DDR1 memory, and much more in this analysis. Without further ado, let's being our journey through the maze of DDR1 with OCZ's PC3700 Gold Rev. 3 memory as our reference point...

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